stitution it had not a straight floor, and
hardly a straight line; but it had outlasted, and clearly would yet
outlast, many a better-trimmed building, many a sprucer public-house.
Externally, it was a narrow lopsided wooden jumble of corpulent windows
heaped one upon another as you might heap as many toppling oranges,
with a crazy wooden verandah impending over the water; indeed the whole
house, inclusive of the complaining flag-staff on the roof, impended
over the water, but seemed to have got into the condition of a
faint-hearted diver who has paused so long on the brink that he will
never go in at all.

This description applies to the river-frontage of the Six Jolly
Fellowship Porters. The back of the establishment, though the chief
entrance was there, so contracted that it merely represented in its
connexion with the front, the handle of a flat iron set upright on its
broadest end. This handle stood at the bottom of a wilderness of court
and alley: which wilderness pressed so hard and close upon the Six Jolly
Fellowship Porters as to leave the hostelry not an inch of ground beyond
its door. For this reason, in combination with the fact that the house
was all but afloat at high water, when the Porters had a family wash the
linen subjected to that operation might usually be seen drying on lines
stretched across the reception-rooms and bed-chambers.

The wood forming the chimney-pieces, beams, partitions, floors and
doors, of the Six Jolly Fellowship Porters, seemed in its old age
fraught with confused memories of its youth. In many places it had
become gnarled and riven, according to the manner of old trees; knots
started out of it; and here and there it seemed to twist itself into
some likeness of boughs. In this state of second childhood, it had an
air of being in its own way garrulous about its early life. Not without
reason was it often asserted by the regular frequenters of the Porters,
that when the light shone full upon the grain of certain panels, and
particularly upon an old corner cupboard of walnut-wood in the bar, you
might trace little forests there, and tiny trees like the parent tree,
in full umbrageous leaf.

The bar of the Six Jolly Fellowship Porters was a bar to soften the
human breast. The available space in it was not much larger than a
hackney-coach; but no one could have wished the bar bigger, that space
was so girt in by corpulent little casks, and by cordial-bottles
radiant with fictitious